UPDATED 13:38 EDT / MAY 13 2016

NEWS

Successful Acacia IPO raises new hope for tech startups eyeing stock market

Acacia Communications Inc.’s stock price is up more than 30 percent on its first day of trading in what marks the technology sector’s first successful public offering of the year. For the network equipment maker, the occasion is made all the more memorable by the fact that it managed to raise a hefty $103.5 million yesterday after selling an initial batch of 4.5 million shares for $23 apiece.

The number stands at the top end of the target price range that Acacia announced earlier this month while making the final preparations for its NASDAQ debut. The offering’s success sends an encouraging signal to the other companies that had hoped to go public this year, but were forced to push off their plans due to investors’ lackluster appetite for technology stocks. Yet although today’s IPO certainly raises new hope for Silicon Valley, not every affected firm will find reason to celebrate.

Acacia’s public offering comes only a few weeks after Dell Inc. spin-off SecureWorks Corp., the only other technology company that hit the stock market this year, started trading $28 million short of its minimum funding target. The main reason behind the discrepancy appears to be the fact that in contrast with Acacia, SecureWorks is unprofitable, a situation shared by many of the other technology firms that have been eyeing an IPO lately.

As a result, there’s still a long wait ahead before a startup operating in the red can go public without meeting the same fate as SecureWorks, which has two major recursions for the tech industry. First, the firms with the highest burn-rates will continue cutting expenses to make their private funding last longer, which means more layoffs. And second, the venture capitalists who backed those firms will have to keep waiting for a return, a delay that will likely perpetuate the current slowdown in new startup investments.

Image via Wikimedia

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